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Talk to the Newsroom:Assistant Managing EditorGerald Marzorati

Gerald Marzorati, assistant managing editor at The Times and editor of The Times Magazine answered reader questions on the weekly magazine, the T Style magazines and other topics, during the week of July 24.

Before coming to The Times in 1994, Mr. Marzorati worked as an editor at the New Yorker and at Harper's Magazine.

Several other editors have answered questions in this column in previous weeks:

The Magazine's Place in the Industry

Q. Mr. Marzorati -- Since you've addressed the differences between newspaper and magazine journalism, I'm hoping you can also write about the differences between magazine journalism at the N.Y. Times and in the rest of the industry. How does your association with the newspaper change the magazine's production and style? Can you imagine how the Sunday magazine would be different if it were independent of The Times?

-- Jake Tracer

A. Dear Mr. Tracer -- As anyone who has ever attended a National Magazine Award ceremony can testify (and if you can get out of attending, do) the word "magazine" covers a lot of print (and now digital) territory: newsweeklies, literary quarterlies, opinion publications, shelter books (magazine-business jargon for glossies about homes and home furnishings) and a few last, hard-fighting general-interest magazines -- fighting because they face big financial challenges. Advertisers have over the years become increasingly convinced that specialized "vertical" magazines (you know, the Extreme Sportser, Starlet With New Baby Again News) are what you, the reader, is passionate about, and passion puts you in the mood to buy. Me, I love general interest magazines, because I love deep reporting, long non-fiction narratives, Big Think, and serendipity. Whatever the bottom-line challenges faced by, say, the Atlantic and the New Yorker, they (along with the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and, okay, my own favorite ad-free vertical, the Wine Advocate) are the other magazines I read (not skim or look at).

Every magazine differs from other magazines, and The Times Magazine, a general-interest magazine, differs from these other general-interest magazines, most obviously, in that our delivery system is not the newsstand or the postal service, but The Times itself. I see that as a pure blessing. Nearly 2 million people buy The Sunday Times, they're a national, educated, informed readership and they get the magazine on Sunday morning, when they are most likely to have time to read the long-form pieces we like to publish. Top journalists like reporting and writing for us because they want to reach our audience. And, despite being a general-interest magazine, a lot of advertisers like us too. And advertisers -- I mention this because a surprising number of readers writing to me this week seem to have a problem with "too much" advertising or "gas guzzler" advertising or "all those underfed women in weird clothes" advertising -- ALLOW US TO STAY IN BUSINESS! Did you guys grow up reading Pravda?

Q. Dear Mr. Marzorati -- I'm a high school student interested in both magazine and newspaper journalism, and I've been wondering about the differences between the mediums. What challenges do magazine editors and writers face that those on a newspaper do not?

-- Jim Santel, St. Louis

A. When I was in high school, in the late 1960's, I discovered long-form magazine journalism, which was having a real breakthrough moment in publications like Esquire, New York, the New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post. Writers like Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and John McPhee were experimenting with voice, narrative structure and point-of-view. These literary devices were the things I was learning about in my English class, reading Balzac and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but these magazines writers were writing 10,000-, 15,000-word stories; true stories based in reporting and facts, about the America I was living in. I couldn't wait to get to study hall, get a pass to the library and see what had arrived in the magazine rack. I can still see myself sitting and reading the pieces, as -- nearly 40 years on -- I now sit in my office and read the pieces, except they're ones I've assigned.

I begin with that because I think as you begin to think about journalism, you should picture how it is you might want to spend your days. Teachers and guidance counselors don't talk that way often enough. You might want to be writing -- but do you want to be home alone writing all day (like magazine writers) or in a bustling newsroom (like newspaper reporters)? Do you want to go home from work at the end of the day knowing you will see in print the next morning the fruits of your labor (like newspaper people) or would you rather immerse yourself in a story or subject for a longer period of time (like magazine people)?

What I'm saying is I think you can tell the difference between a newspaper and a magazine. What you might want to think about is the difference between a newspaper and magazine life.

Best of luck, whichever choice you make.

Surge in Corrections?

Q. Gerald, I've noticed the New York Times Sunday Magazine has already published 21 corrections for 2006, up significantly from last year, when it had 8 corrections, and in 2004, only 4 corrections were published.

What's the reason for this sudden surge in corrections? Has The Times cut back on copy editors or eliminated fact checkers, perhaps? Or has the content of the magazine become more current, making deadlines tighter, and therefore increasing the margin for error?

-- Bill Lucey

A. Dear Bill -- I don't have the numbers in front of me, and don't have the time (what with Lebanon and Israel and an issue to close tomorrow) to track them down. My first reaction is to not believe we had so few corrections in previous years. We publish upwards of 20,000 words each Sunday, and that would mean that among the, say, 100,000 sentences we publish annually, fewer than ten have some factual error or another?

But let's assume (and I do assume) that you are roughly right -- that is to say, that the number of corrections in the magazine is trending upward. I'd point to two factors: 1) We at The Times are less and less reluctant to correct even the tiniest mistakes. I remember one from earlier this year that appeared in an article about Michael Steele, who is running for the Senate in Maryland. We had referred to a university where he spoke as Salisbury State. Nope, it's now Salisbury University. This is hardly a credibility breaker, but, for the record, we corrected it. 2) You, our readers, are in better touch with us, thanks to technology, and let us know big-time when he goof. I seem to recall that more than once this year we have published corrections of recipes -- mistakes brought to our attention by irate cooks and eaters.

That said, we editors, reporters and fact-checkers here struggle mightily each week to get things right -- get things right by double-checking with officials in China in the middle of our night and officers in Iraq on sat phones as well as recipe writers down the hall. My stomach churns every time we don't get something right, and it pleases me a lot when I get to the bottom of a proof I'm reading of the letters pages and find no correction there.

Choosing the Cover

Q. How are the images for the cover of the magazine chosen? I don't suspect a hidden conspiracy, but I have noticed that a high percentage of covers feature men -- and close-ups at that. Even covers which feature gender-neutral topics seem to feature male figures more often than female ones. Just wondering if this very causal observation is at all accurate, and if so, why?

-- Janice Murabayashi, San Diego, Calif.

A. Dear Ms. Murabayashi -- Choosing the cover image is a collaboration between the art director, the photo editor and myself, often with input from another editor or two and sometimes the author of the cover story. When I read what you wrote, about noticing a high percentage of covers featuring men, I got up and walked to the office next door, where we always have the previous 18 covers on a wall. It turns out -- at least from this sample -- that you've noticed wrong. Of the 18, 11 were what we call "concept" covers: paintings or illustrations of objects or items (a condom package for a cover story on contraception, for example). None of these showed a man. Four featured photographs of women: a refugee in Darfur, an illegal immigrant, a child actress (and her mom), and, just last week, a female child-welfare worker. Only three covers featured photographs of men: a Muslim immigrant in London, an Islamic televangelist and an Iraq-war vet. And only the televangelist was a close-up.

Maybe you confused us with Esquire.

Thinking Up the Funny Pages

Q. First off, let me write a big thanks. I love the magazine, best part of the Sunday paper. Regrettably, I can't get The Times over here in Iraq and reading the mag online just isn't the same. The other day I was up in Mosul. An officer I had a meeting with up there had a big stack of The Times with one of the magazines on top behind his desk, which I eyed jealously throughout the meetings. His wife must have mailed them to him.

Photo

Credit
Robert Maxwell

Anyway, my question: How did you make the decision to add the story/comic book section? I read the explanation why in that edition and I kind of buy it. What I'd like to know is how you came to the decision and how did you pick those particular categories? It seems like such a break with the direction of the magazine. Thanks much and keep up the good work!

-- CDR Brendan McLane

A. Dear Commander (have I got that right?) McLane -- Your letter has already made my day, not just that you like the magazine, but -- speaking as a general-interest-magazine editor, that is, as someone who lives to reach the generally curious reader -- that you wrote me from Iraq not to pick apart our coverage of the war but to inquire about comics and stuff!

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In one respect, you embody the reason I was interested in scheming up the Funny Pages. In the post-9/11 world, a lot of our pages are being devoted to Iraq and, more generally, to national security and the war on terror. I wanted there to be a place in the magazine that was escapist. I count on attracting readers who want to be informed, of course, but I also count on attracting readers who want to be entertained -- hence the crossword puzzle, the Ethicist column, and so on. We reach readers on Sunday morning, when a quiet break from the world, an escape, may be precisely what they have in mind.

The other big thing I had in mind was finding some way to evoke the funny pages of old-timey Sunday papers (though not of the Times, which never had them) in a contemporary way, and here, our popular culture presented a prefect opportunity. To me, the graphic novel -- the book-length narrative told in comics-style by artists like Chris Ware and others -- is one of the most vibrant young mediums we have. Ditto a new kind of humor writing which is neither jokey nor satirical but memoirish and oddball, a kind of writing that has popped up in recent years at reading nights in clubs and bars in New York, and on the public-radio show "This American Life." (As it happens, two of the people here involved in the Funny Pages, Paul Tough and John Hodgman, have produced things for "This American Life." Hodgman also now has the strangest moonlighting gig any writer at the magazine has ever had -- he plays the tweedy PC in the new Apple TV commercials.) The third feature of the Funny Pages is serial fiction, and, again, I happen to think we are living in a terrific era for genre fiction -- that is crime, detective, and legal-thriller fiction -- and since no other magazine was publishing it, why not us?

You are right, it's a break with the tradition of the magazine -- with The Times as a whole, for that matter. But as we seek out new readers across the country and around the globe (via the Web), I suspect we'll be doing a lot more things that haven't been done before. Now, as a lot of letter writers have made clear, the Funny Pages are not for everyone, but as a lot of other letter-writers (especially younger ones) have made clear, they love them. Me, I want readers to find something to like in the magazine each week, and then take a bike ride or play with the kids. Hey, it's Sunday.

You keep safe.

Broadsheets, Tabloids, Etc.

Q. Dear Sir,Do you foresee magazine size dailies in the future? This should not be funny. Broadsheets are becoming tabloids - the reason is their handiness. Mags are handier. So why not dailies take shape of magazines? Thanks and regards.

-- Shamsuddin Ahmed, Dhaka, Bangladesh

A. Dear Shamsuddin Ahmed -- I'm not sure about a daily Times magazine of one sort or another -- because of the production values editors and readers alike seek from a magazine, they take longer to design and print than newspapers. Also, magazine paper stock is more expensive than newsprint, and that would be a factor. But it would not surprise me at all in the coming years if there are more Times magazines, with one of more of them distributed during the week.

There is also the whole questions of magazines on the Web. A number of good ones are already out there. But these are almost exclusively sites devoted to commentary or information, factual and not. Who will invent the first great Web equivalent of a glossy? And, if I may speak as a publisher, who will advertise (magazines tend to attract luxury brand advertising, which is not a huge presence on the Web yet) and what form will this advertising take (videos perhaps?).

Who Reads T?

Q. Sir -- T Magazine is a beautiful book with great pictures and interesting contributors, but I am baffled by who you think reads T. While I'm sure that The Times has a far more affluent average reader than most newspapers, the rest of us enjoy the Sunday paper just as much. Do you really have a significant readership that's going to plunk down over $1000 for a suitcase, as was featured in one of your recent pieces, or do your editors think such things are aspirational? Even Vogue has learned to throw in one or two affordable items on a page to keep the rest of us interested. Who is your target reader?

Respectfully,

Alexandra Farkas, Brooklyn, NY

A. Dear Ms. Farkas -- I have received a number of thoughtful letters similar to yours, from readers puzzled by -- or, frankly, contemptuous of -– our new style and luxury magazine, T, so indulge me a bit as I try to answer your question by answering what I sense is the underlying question (and perhaps the underlying question to or about editors like me on the minds of many, many of the Times’ readers). Yours is ultimately a question (again, like so many posed by readers) about bias –- in this case, a bias toward the rich and their shopping habits. And my answer is that while I do not think the paper, in its news section, is biased toward liberals, or biased in favor of (or against!) Israel, I do think, in cultural matters –- of which fashion and, more broadly, style, is one expression -- we are biased (in terms of space devoted to coverage, photography and so on) toward the rich. And the reason we are is that The Times, though not to my mind a simply liberal paper or a pro- or anti-Israeli paper, is an urbane, cosmopolitan paper edited from the world capital of urbanity and cosmopolitanism, Manhattan, which means we are biased in favor of change, possibility, mobility, individual liberty and going to bed late –- oh, and the rich, who are rather concentrated among us. So, philosophically, guilty as charged.

Let me float back down to earth for a moment, and say that there are items featured in our T magazines which are what would generally be agreed upon to be affordable, and that T could stand a few more items like these in each issue (there are now more than a dozen T's coming at you each year) to be sure. But my guess is the $1,000 suitcase (or the $3,500 dress, or the $20,000 watch) would still get most of your, or anyone else’s, attention. Some of the attention would be from eager purchasers –- though that’s not you, or me. Some of the readers might be, as you perceptively note, aspirational -– they might dream of buying said pricey item, but will eventually buy something less expensive that might be inspired by, or appear fashionably similar to, the high-priced item. But to tell you the truth that’s not me either. At the risk of causing aneurysms among the magazine’s ad staff, I don’t shop from T or any other style magazine.

To explain why I do love T, and why I was eager to launch it here –- maybe sometime in the future Stefano Tonchi, the editor of T, will answer readers' questions and give you his take -- I am going to float back up into the high ether again, and bring in one of my heroes (I don’t have many), the Czech playwright, dissident and eventual president Vaclav Havel. Among his voluminous writings is an essay I remember in which he defends the preservation of a number of villas in Prague, villas denounced by the Communists as the old palaces of the grand bourgeoisie. (Raze them for workers’ housing!) Havel writes warmly of the villas, and counsels his fellow citizens -– whom Communism delivered into block after block of drab, Soviet-style housing – to try to understand that much of the best of the West’s cultural legacy was produced by the wealthy and, at least originally, for the wealthy, and that should in no way undermine the truth that these objects or things are interesting and beautiful – interesting and beautiful, potentially, for everyone, even those who don’t own them.

I think T is interesting and beautiful, potentially, for everyone – even those who will never own a suitcase that cost a thousand bucks. I think fashion, like wine (which I do shop for, alas, from magazines, or, anyway, newsletters), is something you can learn more about and thus appreciate more, even if you feel a little silly saying so. (I sat next to the Times’ superb fashion critic, Cathy Horyn, at a few runway shows in Paris last fall, and began to learn how to really look, for the first time, at cuts and folds and so on.) I think style, more broadly, is being democraticized in America, reaching more kinds of stuff (why did my son want an ipod and not some other mp3 player?) and across all class lines (re: Target). I think this represents an important change, and I think T is the magazine of that change.

The Magazine-Newspaper Overlap

Q. Sir -- My question is this: sometimes I find that the Times magazine publishes stories which have been extensively covered in the daily newspaper. Obviously, the magazine goes into much further detail and, in some cases, reveals new information. How do you go about arranging things so that your coverage doesn't overlap -- or scoop -- the daily newspaper?

-- Arnold Morton, New York

A. Mr. Morton -- Your question about a magazine story overlapping with stories in one or another of the paper’s sections is one I wrestle with only... well, all the time. As it happens, I've just returned to my desk from a weekly meeting of the editors of the various "feature" sections of the paper – Dining In/Dining Out, House & Home, the Book Review, etc., along with the magazine, or magazines now -- at which we were discussing the fifth anniversary of 9/11. And yes, coverage-wise, as this meeting turned up, there will inevitably be some overlap in coverage. But it’s a problem, we all think, for which any strong cure for which would be worse – i.e., ANOTHER layer of list-making, beat-policing edit-crats stifling the natural urge of journalists to chase down the stories that get them excited.

So, when we at the magazine are to embark on a story, we let our appropriate colleagues around the paper know what we are up to, and if someone is doing precisely, or close to precisely, that for some or another section, we back off – and vice versa, sort of. Thus, you will not read in The Times this summer two profiles of Gnarls Barkley (and if you have to ask who, or what, Gnarls Barkley is... okay, maybe you won’t read one – but if you want to read one, a smart and delightful one by Chuck Klosterman, we ran it in our June 18 issue).

Or, as the Times is now a multi-platform news-and-information source, we might take a story we are about to publish and figure out ways to spin in out in other platforms of the paper (and non-paper). This is what we did a couple of weeks ago with a story we had on the cycler Floyd Landis. We had the scoop that his hip was in bad shape and that he would seek a replacement once he completed the Tour de France (and man did he complete it!). We closed the story on Friday, July 7, for our issue of Sunday, July 16. (The lag time is due to printing and shipping.) In order to get the scoop out there quickly, we posted our story on the Web site on the afternoon of Sunday, July 9, having tipped off our sports section, so it could be ready with a story for the print paper Monday morning. Overlap, yes, but also a Times scoop, a digital read, and a full magazine piece in print – take your choice.

But on those big, ongoing stories – Iraq, for example, or, just now, the roiling Mideast – we at the magazine are going to find our way of approaching the front-page news. That tends to mean extensive photography, in-depth opinion essays and long-form non-fiction narratives – forms that are read and viewed less for scoops or coverage than for sustained engagement and emotional engrossment. In a word, pleasure. The particular pleasure – literary, visual, even tactile – that a magazine can bring. Or so I hope.